Thinking of starting an Adobe AEM project?
Don’t make this BIG mistake.
In this quicktake, I’ll walk you through the most important step you and your team can do to ensure a successful project – before you even start it.
You’ll thank me later.
Over the past decade, I've helped dozens of companies better understand Adobe technology and project delivery. Along the way I've had the opportunity to see a lot of what works and a lot of what doesn't. My goal is simply to share with YOU what I've learned. And I hope that gives you back a little sanity in your day.
💡 What do you think? Share your thoughts in the comments and let's have a conversation about it.
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Transcript:
Do this one thing before you start an adobe AEM project and you'll thank me later
Hi, I'm Rick. I help companies better understand Adobe technology and project delivery. And this is a quicktake.
Okay, so let's get into it. Last week I was onsite with a new client and we were conducting a kind of a feature state brainstorming session. They knew that they wanted to implement Adobe AEM, which was a replatforming from a legacy content tool.
They also knew that they wanted to redesign the site. They wanted to take this opportunity to implement some personalization and also do some integrations with other tools, internationalization as an example.
And as we discuss the current state and what their future state looks like over the three days, one thing became abundantly clear.
Even though they had a very good sense of what they wanted in their future state. They really didn't know a click down from there. Meaning what does the redesign design look like? How would you leverage personalization? How is content going to be authored around the organization? What type of tools do we need to integrate with the CMS?
What does the timeline look like? Who are the resources internally? Those types of things. The most interesting part was that they already have written an rfp and they sent it out to a half dozen vendors for bidding.
So you might be saying to yourself, well, this sounds kind of familiar. We've done this. And to be honest with you after 11 years of implementing adobe AEM for clients you're kind of right, this does happen way too often.
But unfortunately this brings up a significant amount of risk. I discussed in a previous mini pod around fixed bid and the whole idea of trying to get the facts correct around scope time and requirements.
Since the RFP was already out for bidding, those bids would come in and ultimately influenced the cap ex of the project. And then when the project starts. The conversations that took place during the discovery process, a lot of these things are going to start to be flushed out, which then adds scope to the overall project. So here's what i recommend every one of my clients do before getting into this type of situation.
Before the RFP is written. Take some time and have internal workshops and have true honest dialogue about what you're trying to accomplish in this initial project.
Think long-term think crawl, walk, run. What are the things that need to happen? For us to achieve our goals within an initial implementation. Having those honest conversations and then documenting them, rallying around them and grounding them to the success of the project would then ultimately lead to a better RFP. I better bidding. Less scope and overall less risk.